Kacey Musgraves – Pageant Material

It’s a measure of how innocuous mainstream country music has become that Kacey Musgraves finds herself cast as Nashville’s latest rebel. For her part, the 26-year-old Texan seems disinclined to suffer that appellation gladly. More than once, in interviews, she has insisted that she doesn’t “push buttons just to push buttons,” and having spent the last couple of weeks becoming better acquainted with her music, I have to take her at her word. If approving gay romance and recreational pot use makes one a rebel, than practically every singer-songwriter to the left of Willie Nelson must be downright seditious. And name-dropping Gram Parsons in a song might impress the progressive country set, but it doesn’t make you Emmylou Harris. I say this not to slight Musgraves, of whom I am a fan. Indeed, she may well be the best thing to happen to country radio since Patty Loveless. But that hardly makes her a revolutionary. It just makes her … well, good.

It’s probably too soon to tell, but Pageant Material, the sophomore followup to Same Trailer, Different Park, may go down as the best almost-conventional country album of 2015. “Biscuits,” the album’s lead single, has garnered undue attention for the line “pissin’ in my yard ain’t gonna make yours any greener.” But as a song, it’s no more outrageous than Tom T. Hall’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” was 47 years ago, and covers a lot of the same ground. Like the latter, it has been characterized as a novelty tune, and maybe that’s accurate, but its line-danceable exuberance and faux-cornpone charm make me not care. Like Same Trailer’s “Follow Your Arrow,” it is a variation on the MYOFB theme that seems to be one of Musgraves’s favorites. And if it’s too cute to serve as the centerpiece of a mostly plainspoken collection of songs, that’s okay, too. For that, we’ve got the album’s titular song, or maybe “Are You Sure,” a Willie Nelson cover recorded with the redheaded stranger himself and included here as a hidden last track. Nelson, like John Prine, seems to be one of Musgraves’s musical heroes, and their duet signals an affinity with classic country-western songcraft that can only serve the younger artist well as she matures as a songwriter in her own right.

Though she might not think of herself as an upstart, Musgraves does seem to anticipate that charge on songs like “Cup of Tea” and “Good Ol’ Boys Club” — “I’ve never been too good at just goin’ along,” she sings on the latter, “guess I’ve always kind of been for the underdog.” As for playing the game, “When did it become about who you know/And not how good you are?” If the outlaw label is the price she has to pay for succeeding on her own terms, she seems to be saying, so be it. “I’d rather lose for what I am,” states the pageant show reject of the title track, “than win for what I ain’t.”

Complaints? Okay, Musgraves’s reliance on banalities (“If you ain’t got nothin’ nice to say, don’t say nothin’ at all”) is, at times, cringeworthy, but one expects she’ll outgrow it soon enough. She’s young, and this is only her second major-label album. It’s important to remember that it took Loretta Lynn at least a couple of records to become great.

Musgraves made her mark right out of the gate with the impressive debut single “Merry Go ‘Round,” whose less than celebratory take on small-town life reportedly made record label executives nervous. As long as she continues to explore her weltanschauung with unflinching honesty, she stands a good chance of outlasting most of her 24-hour, truck bed-rocking contemporaries.